MR. CEARLEY: I expect his direct may be an hour to an hour and
a half.

THE COURT: Okay.

Thereupon,

WILLIAM VERNON MAYER,

called on behalf of the Plaintiffs herein, after having been first duly
sworn or affirmed, was examined and testified as follows:

DIRECT EXAMINATION

BY MR. CEARLEY:

Q:
Will you please state your full name for the record?

A: William Vernon Mayer.

Q: Briefly tell the Court what your educational background is?

A: I have a Ph.D. in biology from Stanford University in California.
I have taught at Stanford, the University of Southern California, Wayne
State University and University of Colorado.

At the University of Southern California, I became head of the biology
department, acting head. I was head of the biology department at Wayne
State University. I was associate dean of the college of liberal arts.
I am currently, as I say, professor of biology at the University of Colorado.

A: Yes, sir. At the time I was obtaining my doctorate, I went for a fifth
year at Stanford University, took all the required courses for a certificate
in teaching science. This included all the standard educational courses
such as history of education, philosophy of education, educational sociology,
educational psychology, statistics, methodology and so forth.

Q: You have prepared at my request a curriculum vitae, have you not?

A: Yes, sir.

Q: And does that accurately reflect your education, training, experience
and publications

A: Yes, sir.

MR. CEARLEY: Your Honor, that curriculum vitae has previously
been furnished to the defendants and is marked as Plaintiffs' Exhibit 92
for identification. I move its admission.

THE COURT: It will be received.

MR. CEARLEY: (Continuing)

Q: Do you have any publications that are not included in your most recent
curriculum?

A: Yes, sir. Last month I presented a paper at Nashville, Tennessee,
to the National Science Teachers Association area meeting entitled "The
Fallacious Nature

Q: And in that regard, have you held several positions or with BSCS,
have you held several positions?

A: Yes, sir. I started with the BSCS in 1960, where I came aboard as
a writer on the topic of evolution. I became associate director of that
organization and assumed the executive directorship in 1967, which I have
held to this date.

Q: Do you act as consultant to any educational groups or institutions?

A: Yes, sir. I have consulted with school boards in Florida and North
Dakota. I have been a consultant and am a consultant on the advisory board
of Encyclopaedia Britannica films. I have consulted with various industries
and state, local and federal government agencies.

Q: What are your responsibilities, Doctor Mayer, and activities as the
director of BSCS?

A: Well, the executive director is responsible for everything. But basically,
my job is to implement the mission of the organization and to insure that
it is well managed.

It is to insure that we retain contact with both the educational and
scientific communities, maintain frequent contact with schools, school
boards, state boards of education and to have liaison with publishers,
producers of educational materials.

Q: Have you consulted with educators or school districts or school institutions
in this country and abroad?

A: Yes, sir. As I say, in California, Florida, South Dakota, a variety
of places.

Q: Doctor Mayer, do you have any association with the National Association
of Biology Teachers?

A: Yes, sir. I've been a member of that organization for a number of
years. I was president-elect, president and past president. I'm an honorary
member of that organization, and I'm chairman of the NAST committee for
education in evolutionary biology.

A: (Continuing) organization exclusively devoted to this activity. And
it been primarily in response to new text book subject matter, particularly
the use of the word "evolution", that has allowed this group to reform
and resurrect itself.

Q: Does your role with the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study bring
you into contact with the creation science movement, if I can use that
term, or with creation scientists?

A: Yes, it does. From its inception in 1960, BSCS knew that the inclusion
of evolutionary material in textbooks would essentially be a red flag to
a segment of the fundamentalist community.

However, as one of the board members stated at the time, `A hundred
years without Darwin are enough', and we did have the temerity to reintroduce
the term "evolution" and a discussion of evolution into text.

Q: What, if you can describe briefly, Doctor Mayer, is the purpose or
what are the goals of the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study?

A: Most simply stated, the goal is the improvement of biological education
at all levels. When the BSCS began, we concentrated on the tenth grade
level simply because that was the academic level at which most students
in the United States contacted biology for the first time as a

A: (Continuing) discrete discipline. And it was felt that that is where
our initial impact should have been. Since that time, we have prepared
materials from kindergarten through college and into adult education. We've
used every conceivable type of medium to get the message across, games,
models, films, even television programs.

We have defined educational goals of the organization as serving a broad
population of students from the educable mentally handicapped to what is
now called the gifted and talented student.

And, lastly, we have recognized the transdiciplinary ramifications of
the subject of biology so that materials now incorporate a much broader
definition than biology formerly occupied.

Q: Does BSCS stress any particular areas of biology?

A: Well, it stresses, first of all, a basic concept of biology. The problem
has been that if— Content gets very far behind, so that we wanted, first
of all, to be at cutting edge, acquaint students with what was happening
in the mid-twentieth century. And, secondly, there was no agreement on
the best way to do this.

A: textbook, for example, is kind of a carrier current for information.
And depending on the noise to signal ratio, you get a better or less good
reception. So that we decided, as we could not agree on one single way
to

A: (Continuing) write a textbook, we would write three. Now, three was
completely arbitrary, based primarily on the availability of time and money.
We could have written thirty, but we concentrated on three. We produced
three basic books.

First, one that came to be known as the green version." These were color
coded, simply not to clue anybody to their content , so that we could see
if people actually had a real preference not prejudiced by a title. The
green version was an ecological approach. It approached biology in terms
of the organism and its environment.

The blue version was a molecular approach. It approached biology from
the standpoint basically of biochemistry

The yellow version was what you might call a developmental and cellular
approach, a more classic approach to biology.

The initial idea was that we would try these three out, and one would
swim and the others would sink. We found, however, that these books are
now in fourth and fifth editions, and there is a market for a wide variety
of approaches to biology. And it seems reasonable to us that others would
write additional texts based on different approaches to the subject and
still find a market.

Q: Doctor Mayer, does BSCS produce text materials or textbooks and teaching
materials in other areas of science?

A: We have produced materials in a variety of areas, particularly as
science impacts in the social sciences. For example, land use is a module
that applies scientific data to the management of land.

Energy is another module that takes the problems of our energy shortages,
their biological relationships, and, indeed, their global relationships.

So we have a variety of works that extend beyond what you might call
the traditional boundaries of biology.

Q: Will you tell the Court how BSCS came into existence?

A: About 1957-58, the National Academy of Sciences' national research
council investigated the status of science education, particularly in American
high school, and found it woefully wanting, and decided that this, in a
technological age, was unacceptable.

About the same time, the first Russian sputnik went up, which gave cry
to the fact that American science education was obviously falling behind
because the Russians had beaten us.

At that time, the National Science Foundation made grants to a number
of organizations with the specific injunction to research and prepare materials
that would replace those currently in use in secondary school science

A: (Continuing) courses, primarily. And this was done. The initial grant
was made to the American Institute of Biological Sciences in 1958. In the
early Sixties, around 1962, this grant was transferred to the University
of Colorado. And in the early Seventies, BSCS became a private nonprofit
50IC3 corporation to manage things that the university was not willing
to have on campus.

Q: Initially, how did BSCS go about producing these three textbooks that
you testified to?

A: Well, as science is what scientists do, the first thing we did was
assemble a cadre of distinguished biological scientists from throughout
the United States. There were roughly thirty-five of these.

We also felt that, despite the fact that scientists knew science, they
didn't know education very well. So we figured one way of ameliorating
that situation was to pair a scientist with a teacher. So we brought an
equal number of teachers. In short, we had seventy people, scientist and
teacher in pairs. The scientist to know the science; the teacher to tell
that person whether the material produced was teachable or not. There's
no point in producing materials that people can't understand that are above
the grade level.

A: (Continuing) to outline the course of work, what was to be done, what
the content was to be. We had a curriculum content committee that outlined
the three works. Teams met in Boulder, Colorado, in the summer of 1960
and produced a series of three paperback books that I've elucidated.

These books were then tried out with a hundred or so teachers and several
thousand students in 1960-61, in the school year. And there were meetings
around the country, people came together to decide whether this was working,
did it reach the students, was it valuable.

And on the basis of extensive feedback from teachers and students, the
materials were returned to the BSCS and rewritten by a much larger team.
This time we had a hundred and fifteen teachers and educators, and much
larger field tests with over a thousand teachers and a couple hundred thousand
students who, again, tested the materials, which were found to be acceptable,
new, exciting on both the part of the teacher and the student. And on the
basis of that, we had originally decided to make simple models that other
people could copy, but because we had gone so far and the interest now
was so great in preserving the content of the initial three, contracts
were let with private publishers to produce these books. And they came
out with commercial editions

Q: And you've been marketing those textbooks or other derivatives from
them ever since?

A: Yes, we have.

Q: Are you familiar, Doctor Mayer, with how other publishers develop
their text materials for teaching science?

A: Yes, sir. Over the years I've worked with practically every major
publisher of textbooks in the United States.

Q: Will you tell the Court how that is done?

A: It depends on the publisher. Publishing is a quite competitive industry,
and in a way publishing is like the movie industry or like television.
When something succeeds, other people produce duplicates, produce clones
of this material. The BSCS material cloned very well, and we were very
happy to have it do so.

And I was involved with a number of publishers. They normally pick an
author team, decide on the framework of a course, prepare a manuscript,
collect illustrations. The publisher looks at his input from the marketing
standpoint, and a new work comes out.

This usually is a process taking two, three, sometimes four years, depending
on the publisher.

A: (Continuing) "managed textbooks." Regardless of whose name is on the
book, the book is produced in-house within a publishing establishment.
And the authors in that case are kind of a facade.

The publisher feels that his or her group of individuals knows the marketplace
better than teachers, and, therefore, would be in a better position to
produce a marketable, if not a really contributory text.

Q: How do the participants in these decisions determine the actual content
of these textbooks?

A: Well, as I said, science is what scientists do. And you look at where
science is at a given point. For example, the textbooks prior to 1960 were
very strongly rooted in the fields of morphology and systematics. That
is, they asked students to list orders of insects, name the parts of flowers,
a tremendous burden of rote memory.

A: student was found, for example, to memorize more new words in a biology
course then if he were enrolled in a foreign language, so that you were
trying to teach the student science, but in essence, you were trying to
teach it in a foreign language.

So we wanted to make sure that the level of vocabulary was down to the
point where the student would get ideas and concepts and major principles
because of the details of the things that one forgets.

Q: I take it, then, that part of your focus was to establish some kind
of cohesive theme in your text materials?

A: Yes. We ended up developing what we called "themes." There were ten
of these. They ran throughout the works. They were pervasive. They were
threads throughout the texts holding the material together. You see, you
need some kind of an organizer, otherwise it's just like going through
a filing cabinet and looking at random cards that aren't even alphabetized.
There needs to be some order to things.

And you try to order a textbook in the logical and reasonable way, So
that we would have a theme such as the interaction of organism and environment,
the interdependence of structure and function, genetics, homeostasis, which
is kind of a physiological bounce, and of course, evolution. These were
all major themes for our texts.

Q: Are there others that you've developed over the years?

A: Yes, sir. Themes, you mean?

Q: Yes, sir.

A: Yes, sir.

Q: How do you go about determining, in your experience, what the current
state of the discipline is?

A: Well, you look, first of all, at the discipline. For example, were
I writing a book today, I would advise somebody to write it around the
field of genetics. This is where the cutting edge of biology is at this
particular moment.

You read daily in your newspapers about genetic engineering, about people
getting patents on new life forms, about all of the problems — I mentioned
cloning a while ago. It got so popular there was even a cloning hoax, if
you recall.

And I think the time is right for someone to come out with a textbook
with a genetics theme because this, in essence, is where biology is going,
where the research is becoming most rapid.

I think I would advise people now to look at the state of health. Health
is a problem in this country. And I certainly would advise them to look
very closely at the content of the discipline in terms of treating science
as a process because recent studies have shown that America is a race of
scientific illiterates. We have bits and pieces of disorganized information.

But as far as understanding the process of science goes, we do very
badly.

Q: How do you select, Doctor Mayer, from among all of the various bits
of information that are available to go

A: This is really the critical issue in education, the selection you
make, because you do make a selection. There is an infinity of information,
and you have a very finite time.

First of all, you have a finite time, and secondly, you have a finite
book. If we attempted to cover everything, the child would have a cart
on which he carried back and forth something like an Encyclopaedia Britannica,
and we wouldn't be sure we'd covered it then.

So you do make a selection. You are going to have a four, five, maybe
six hundred page textbook. You are limited by pages. You are going to have
somewhere around, on a good year with everything going well, you are going
to have roughly a hundred and fifty days of instruction, and that is an
upper limit. You are far more likely to have a hundred and thirty, a hundred
and twenty, a much lesser amount with various other school activities.
So the first thing you have to recognize is that you are dealing with whatever
it is as a finite container for information. Therefore, you ask yourself
the question, `Out of all of the things that we could occupy the students'
time with, which will be the more valuable?' And those are the things you
try to tease out to give the student.

A: (Continuing) For example, we found that having students dissect earthworms
and crayfish and learn long lists of names, really is a nonproductive activity.
First of all, it's rather dull, and secondly, it has no application. So
we would look at materials that were a little more meaningful, little more
conceptually oriented, little less heavy on the vocabulary, and try to
get them to think in terms of, let's say, heredity, or how the blood circulates
through the body, what's the mechanism and why, or nutrition, or any one
of these other topics which could be personally valuable to the student.

Q: How do people in your business, Doctor Mayer, take into consideration
such things as grade level and ability and that kind of thing?

A: Well, we have to study a lot of school systems First of all, we know,
anyone who has had children know, that people operate at different levels
as they get older. So it's quite obvious you are not going to prepare materials
for the first, second or third grades at the same level you are going to
prepare them at the tenth, eleventh and twelfth.

If we really recognize that education is a cumulative process, and in
theory, at each grade level, the student knows a little more than when
he or she started, you are

To simply keep the student spiraling around a single content point for
eight to twelve years is simply ridiculous, so that you try to raise the
level of the student. You try to build on the vocabulary. You try to build
on the ideas so that materials for the sixth or seventh grade aren't similar
to the materials for the twelfth grade.

And also, there is a sequential way in which things are happening. Several
of the witnesses pointed out that if the tenth grade students take biology,
at the eleventh grade they normally take chemistry. And at the twelfth
grade, they normally take physics.

Well, this means that if biology comes before chemistry and you want
to have students do anything chemical, you've got to introduce some chemistry
at that level so that they can get started. You don't try to teach them
all of chemistry; just enough to understand the biological activities that
are going to follow.

So not only are you writing for a reading level and maturity level,
but you are also writing for what you might call a cumulation of knowledge
over the years so that the student isn't bored by the redundancy of his
classes.

Q: Do the terms "scope" and "sequence" in combination have any particular
meaning to you?

A: Yes. To any teachers throughout the United States, most publishers
provide something— Sometimes it's called a scope and sequence chart. It
comes in a number of forms. But in simplest essence, it plots out a school
year and shows the teacher, devote so many days to this, so many days to
that, in this order. And if time is running short, perhaps omit this and
skip on to something else. In other words, it's kind of a roadmap for teaching
during the year. You calculate the number of teaching days you are going
to have, look at your scope and sequence chart, and figure out what in
that number of days that's on that chart can be taken in reasonable and
logical progression and still give the students the best possible education
within the classroom days allocated.

Q: I take it from what you said, Doctor Mayer, that BSCS texts in biology,
anyway, generally follow some sort of organization that's tied together
with major organizing themes, is that correct?

A: Yes, indeed. There is a pattern. You kind of plot out the course of
study before you get down to writing the book so you know where things
will be and, as I say, it is a cumulative kind of thing.

A: (Continuing) must know something about genetics. It becomes meaningless
unless you know something about genetics. So obviously the genetics chapters
will be ahead of the evolution chapters when you seriously begin to talk
about the mechanism of evolution.

Now, that doesn't mean that early in the book you haven't shown children
various types of organisms and arranged them in some kind of a hierarchical
fashion. Some people might regard that as evolutionary, but it requires
no special genetic information to understand that.

Q: Do most other major publishers in the area of biology, that is, publishers
of biology text books, use the same kind of organizational structure?

A: Yes. It's fairly standard throughout the industry, some kind of scope
and sequence chart.

Q: what effect, Doctor Mayer, does the structure of the textbook in a
course such as biology or in any science course have on defining the content
of that course in a classroom situation?

A: It's a tremendously important effect. As a matter of fact, one of
the witnesses today testified to the importance of the textbook as being
a curriculum determinate.

This is kind of a chicken and egg proposition. If you have a curriculum
that has been working well, you try to

A: (Continuing) find a text that matches that. If you think it's time
for a change and you wish to go in a different direction, different emphases,
you may look at a wide variety of textbooks, select the one that most is
congruent with your own patterns and school desires and select that.

But ultimately, in those situations the textbook becomes the curriculum.
What is in the textbook is what is taught. With relatively few exceptions,
teachers tend to stay with the text, and what is more, stay with it chapter
one, two, three, four, seriatim throughout the year, sometimes never getting
to the latter chapters due to simply running out of time.

But the textbook is an extremely important curriculum determinate, even
in those schools and districts where they may have curriculum guides. We
heard the topic of curriculum guide brought up today.

And here you have a situation where a district or sometimes individual
schools, sometimes an entire state, as the state of New York with its region
syllabus, prepares an outline of content. But this is not divorced from
existing materials. One doesn't develop a content outline for which are
no materials.

And you would find that many of these curriculum guides are simply manufactured
by getting a large number of

A: (Continuing) textbooks and going through the tables of contents and
putting them together in one way or another to make a curriculum guide.

This isn't bad. It isn't dishonest. It just emphasizes the very tight
interplay between text and teaching.

Q: Can I assume from your testimony, Doctor Mayer, that you are familiar
with the biology textbooks that are in use in most of the public school
in the United States?

A: I try to keep up with all books. I want to see, you might say, what
the competition is doing, so I do that.

Q: Approximately what percentage of American public schools or textbook
sales in the biology area go to BSCS?

A: This is very difficult information to come by because publishers are
very jealous of their sales figures. But it's been conservatively estimated
by outside sources that fifty percent of American school youngsters use
BSCS materials directly, and a hundred percent use them indirectly because
of the modeling that's taken off from the original BSCS book.

So one needs only to look at the books prior to 1960 and the books subsequent
to 1960 to see the influence BSCS has had.

For example, prior to 1960, the most single popular selling text in
America never used the word "evolution-" It wasn't in the index, it wasn't
anywhere. And when we

A: (Continuing) came along and we introduced the word, so did they. The
word is now in these books. So there has been some progress, some change.

Q: Is there a lot of overlap between textbooks published by different
publishers in your business?

A: Yes. If you excuse the expression, there is no way to have a separate
creation of biology each time a new book is written, so that actually what
you find is about ninety percent of the content in textbooks is common.
All textbooks, for example, cover the cell. All textbooks cover the process
of mitosis. All textbooks provide animal surveys and so on, so that there
are a lot of commonalty to texts.

And maybe about ten percent of the content is different, either through
deliberate selection or through differential emphasis.

Q: Doctor Mayer, you identified evolution as one of the ten major themes,
I think, that BSCS has incorporated in its books. Why did that come about?

A: Well, evolution is simply the only theory that makes biology comprehensible.
Evolution to a biologist is what the atomic theory is to a chemist or physicist;
it ties the discipline together. It makes it make sense. It's the way which
facts can be organized, things can be arranged in hierarchies and biology
understood. There's

A: (Continuing) simply no way you could have a student understand a given
organism if there were no relationships between organisms.

In other words, if there weren't the possibility of transferring information
learned, let's say, on a fish to information applicable to a reptile or
to a mammal or even to humans themselves. We see this everywhere, the ubiquity
of this concept.

Manning and Best could do their work on insulin on dogs because of the
relationship of dogs to humans as in that group called mammals. There was
a transferable bit of information because of similarities of structure
and physiology.

Similarly, you would find hybridization of wheat, for example, operates
on the basis of the fact that there are principles that are applicable
to plant fertilization and plant development and plant genetics.

Q: Do you have—

THE COURT: Mr. Cearley, we're obviously not going to finish this
evening, so why don't we go ahead and recess until 9:00 o'clock in the
morning.